{"id":133930,"date":"2025-09-10T23:36:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T23:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/133930\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T23:36:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T23:36:10","slug":"ai-in-healthcare-seeds-big-dreams-shadowed-by-politics-tight-fisted-payers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/133930\/","title":{"rendered":"AI in Healthcare Seeds Big Dreams, Shadowed by Politics & Tight-Fisted Payers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Vinod Khosla with Nayeema Raza and Eric Newcomer<\/p>\n

If anyone doubted the sincerity of Vinod Khosla\u2019s fervent belief in AI as a healthcare solution, the 70-year-old investor said Tuesday that he asks ChatGPT first when he has a medical question \u2014 and if his doctor disagrees, he asks another doctor.<\/p>\n

Khosla, the first venture investor in OpenAI, is well-known for his bullishness on AI, and he did not disappoint in his appearance at our Deus Ex Medicina health and longevity conference in San Francisco. \u201cAssume AI will be smarter than humans in every area,\u201d he advised. If it weren\u2019t for the intransigence of the American Medical Association, Khosla said, we\u2019d be well on our way to fleets of AI doctors diagnosing diseases and prescribing treatments.<\/p>\n

Yet most of the speakers on Tuesday had a more nuanced view, painting a picture of a sprawling and often dysfunctional industry with a wide range of needs \u2014 and thus a lot of targets for AI healthcare startups. Bringing innovation to the complex and highly regulated healthcare world can be a painstaking process, and more than one speaker pined for being able to start an AI-based medical system from scratch.<\/p>\n

Here are a few more headlines from the day, with further details on the discussions below.<\/p>\n

China was on a lot of peoples\u2019 minds, and there was more than a little envy of the country\u2019s quick drug approval process and openness to innovation.<\/p>\n

There weren\u2019t a lot of RFK Jr. fans in the room, with Khosla and others denouncing the HHS Secretary\u2019s anti-vaccine stance. Khosla gave him a grade of \u201cless than F.\u201d<\/p>\n

Founders were confident that OpenAI and the other big LLM companies won\u2019t be focused enough to execute on niche healthcare applications. \u201cCertain people are running around the world saying one ring will rule them all and it\u2019s just not true,\u201d said Munjal Shah of Hippocratic AI, in a not-very-veiled reference to Sam Altman.<\/p>\n

When it comes to genomics and drug discovery, AI can accelerate the research and clinical trial processes and point to new uses of the data, though it doesn\u2019t have immediate impact on the core biology work.<\/p>\n

Despite Khosla\u2019s views, most of the speakers touted the importance of keeping doctors at the center of healthcare delivery. \u201cHealthcare is about people,\u201d stressed Shiv Rao of Abridge, in the day\u2019s final session. Conversations between patients and providers \u201ccontinue to be a core signal,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The event took place on Tuesday and was emceed by Eric Newcomer and Smart Girl Dumb Questions<\/a> host Nayeema Raza. Newcomer\u2019s next event, the Cerebral Valley AI Summit<\/a>, will take place in San Francisco on November 12. <\/p>\n

Almost everyone in the crowd of health tech investors and founders was bullish on what AI would bring to healthcare; a show of hands revealed barely a skeptic in the room, which could be read as a sign of over-exuberance, or worse.<\/p>\n

Still, some of the early results of AI in healthcare do look impressive.<\/p>\n

Shah said that Hippocratic AI, which uses voice agents to help people manage chronic conditions, had called 200,000 people during a recent East Coast heatwave to check on their vulnerability to heat stroke. Prashant Samant of Akido Labs, which operates a full-stack health system in southern California, said the company\u2019s iPad-based AI diagnostic screening and other tools had increased physician productivity by 400%.<\/p>\n

Daniel Cahn of Slingshot AI, which is building its own LLM for mental health, said a beta test with 50,000 people showed results comparable to human therapists.<\/p>\n

AI tools can not only speed drug development, they can also find hidden gems among molecules that didn\u2019t make it to FDA trials, or were abandoned at an early stage. \u201cI think the old, larger biopharmaceutical companies are sitting on troves and troves of data that they couldn\u2019t really do anything with before,\u201d said Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara. But even with progress on the discovery side, the arduous drug approval process has led America to cede its lead in biotech development to China. <\/p>\n

Formation Bio is focused specifically on the hurdle posed by the cost of clinical trials; the company uses AI to identify and acquire drug candidates that have made it through the first stage, and then speeds the stage-two trials by automating the administrative protocols. Founder Ben Liu said the approach can slash the time it takes to bring a promising drug to market.<\/p>\n

Business models were a big topic of the day, since in healthcare the \u201ccustomer\u201d\u2014 or patient \u2014 is usually not the one paying the bills, and getting the payers (i.e. insurance companies) to underwrite innovative solutions is notoriously tough. Zachary Ziegler outlined how OpenEvidence, an LLM developed specifically for doctors, had decided to offer it for free, with an ad-supported model. It\u2019s certainly a much quicker route than trying to persuade hospitals and doctors, and ultimately the insurers, to pay for it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There was cautious optimism that a regulatory overhaul in Washington would lead to better business outcomes, despite RFK Jr.\u2019s anti-science stance. Oura CEO Tom Hale praised the Trump administration\u2019s new \u201cKill the Clipboard\u201d initiative, which aims to digitize all doctor paperwork and build pathways for patients to share health information with their providers.<\/p>\n

Oak HC\/FT\u2019s Annie Lamont said the Trump Administration has been more constructive than its predecessor when it comes to technology\u2019s role in streamlining patient care. Venrock partner Bob Kocher supported the recent push to overhaul the Medicare Advantage star rating system to allow for more private sector innovation, though solving the insurance company profiteering that has plagued Medicare Advantage remains a huge issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vinod Khosla with Nayeema Raza and Eric Newcomer If anyone doubted the sincerity of Vinod Khosla\u2019s fervent belief…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":133931,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[64,63,137,500],"class_list":{"0":"post-133930","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-healthcare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}